On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked by five young men in a Kingston, New York, parking lot. The assault left the navy veteran, carpenter, and showroom designer in a coma for nine days; he emerged with brain damage that initially made it impossible for him to walk, eat, or speak. State-sponsored physical and occupational therapy helped him regain basic motor skills. But after less than a year he discovered that without insurance, he could no longer afford it. Determined “not to let those five guys win,” Mark turned to art as a therapeutic tool, eventually creating Marwencol, a fictional one-sixth scale town in his backyard populated by military figurines and Barbie dolls, which he captured in an extraordinary series of photographs.

I learned about Mark through his neighbor, Esopus contributor David Naugle, and invited him to debut his work in Esopus 5 (Fall 2005). This exhibition, a part of White Columns’s ongoing “Other People’s Projects” series was the first of a number of exhibitions of Mark's work I have curated in the past several decades. It was also the first time Mark had shown his work in public. Featuring a selection of his photographs as well as a scale-model diorama depicting scenes from life in Marwencol, it garnered a strong response from the public, not to mention signficant critical acclaim.